As the plane descended into Seoul, Robert Calabretta swaddled himself in a blanket, his knees tucked into his chest like a baby in the womb. A single tear ran down his cheek.
The 34-year-old felt like a newborn — he was about to meet his parents for the first time since he was 3 days old.
Most of his life, he thought they’d abandoned him for adoption to the United States. When he finally found them, he learned the truth: The origin story on his adoption paperwork was a lie. Instead, he said, his parents were told in 1986 that their infant was very sick and they thought he had died.
“I am so sorry,” his birth father had written when they found each other, his words interrupted by fits of weeping. “I miss you. How did you endure this cruel world?”
Calabretta is among a growing and vocal community of victims of an adoption system they accuse of searching out children for would-be parents, rather than finding parents for vulnerable children — sometimes with devastating consequences only surfacing today.
South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence they were being procured through questionable or downright unscrupulous means, an investigation led by The Associated Press found. Those children grew up and searched for their roots — and some realized they are not who they were told.
Their stories have sparked a reckoning that is rocking the international adoption industry, which was built in South Korea and spread around the world. European countries have launched investigations and halted international adoption. The South Korean government has accepted a fact-finding commission under pressure from adoptees, and hundreds have submitted their cases for review.
The AP investigation, done in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), was based on interviews with more than 80 adoptees in the U.S., Australia and six European countries, along with parents, agency employees, humanitarian workers and government officials. It also drew on more than 100 information requests and thousands of pages of documents — including many never publicly seen before and some the AP got declassified — from courts, archives, government files and adoption papers.
In dozens of cases AP examined with Frontline, it found: Children were kidnapped off the streets and sent abroad. Parents claim they were told their newborns were dead or too sick to survive, only to have them shipped away. Documents were fabricated to give children identities that belonged to somebody else, leading adoptees to anguished reunions with supposed parents — to later discover they were not related at all.
The agencies and governments each played a part in keeping the baby pipeline pumping. Adoption agencies created a competitive market for children and paid hospitals to supply them, documents show. The South Korean government not only knew of fraudulent practices but designed laws to speed up the exportation of children it deemed undesirable. Western governments turned a blind eye, sometimes even pressuring South Korea for children, while promoting the narrative that they were saving orphans with no other options.
The adoption industry had grown out of the wreckage of the Korean War in the 1950s, when Americans took in the unwanted biracial children born of Korean women and Western soldiers. As it clawed its way out of post-war poverty, South Korea continued to rely on private adoption agencies as its social safety net, bringing millions of dollars into the economy and saving even more by never building its own child welfare program.
Meanwhile, in the West, the number of adoptable babies plummeted because of access to birth control and abortion. The desires of two cultures collided: couples in wealthy nations desperately wanted babies, and South Korea desperately wanted to rid itself of mouths to feed.
As the supply of biracial babies dwindled, South Korea turned to those it saw as unwelcome citizens: fully-Korean children of poor families and unwed mothers.
Korean officials fit their laws to match American ones to make children adoptable for what some deride as “baby diplomacy” to satisfy Western demand. The government endorsed “proxy adoptions,” for families to adopt children quickly without ever visiting Korea, meeting them by the planeloads at American airports.
In an internal memo from 1966 obtained by AP, International Social Service, a Geneva-based organization, wrote that it suspected the Korean government assessed agencies not by child welfare standards, but by the money they brought in.
“There is quite a bit of rivalry and competition among the different agencies, and it is not beyond agencies to bribe or pressure mothers for the release of these children, and not beyond agencies to try to compete with each other for the same child,” officials noted in the document, now at the agency’s archives at the University of Minnesota Libraries.
In 1976, Patricia Nye, east Asia director for ISS, concluded in a memo that the South Korean government was “entirely irresponsible.” What was happening, she wrote, was “close to being scandalous, the mass exportation of children, Korea has been called a baby factory.”
Nye, who has died, said publicly on a BBC program called “A Traffic in Babies,” that Korean adoptions had “gone out of control.”
“We are not talking about little pets or pieces of wood,” Nye said into the camera. “It’s almost like a trade in children … Asian children flowing from Asia to Europe and North America.”
The Korean government tried to downplay the concerns. Documents reveal an official insisted the show — which described the country’s adoption program as “baby wholesaling” — actually depicted it as “organized and well-managed.”
In December 1976, the government facilitated a new law that widened the legal definition of adoptable children, removed judicial oversight and granted vast powers to the heads of private agencies.
The government empowered four agencies to handle most adoptions: Holt Children’s Services, which had pioneered sending Korean children to the U.S., and three others, Eastern Social Welfare Society, Korea Welfare Services and Korea Social Service. A 1983 Health Ministry audit cited all four agencies and accused Holt of providing larger-than-allowed payments to impoverished birth mothers. The ministry’s response was to issue a “warning.”
Records show that officials were aware of a laundry list of dubious practices in the industry: lost children were documented as abandoned; the origins of alleged orphans weren’t verified; some were “disguised” by agencies as being born from unwed mothers to make them adoptable, according to Health Ministry records seen by AP. In the early 1980s, the government itself likened the agencies’ child-hunting practices to “trafficking.” At a meeting in 1982, documents show, the ministry admitted to child “intake” problems and cautioned agencies to improve their practices to avoid the appearance of “trafficking, profiteering.” Yet the government still called for “as many adoptions as possible.”
Calabretta was taken from the Red Cross Hospital in Daegu in 1986. His father, Lee Sung-soo, said an administrator told him his son had serious lung and heart problems. The family didn’t have a lot of money. The only option, the administrator said, was a high-risk and very expensive surgery that could leave the baby dead or severely disabled.
She advised Lee to relinquish his son to Holt, which would pay for the surgery and find a home for a disabled child if he survived.
Lee said he signed the paper, believing it was the only way to save his son, and wept. The AP could not verify Lee’s account — the hospital closed and its records were destroyed. Information obtained through a records request show that 470 children born in that hospital were adopted during the 80s and 90s.
“It felt like the sky was falling,” Lee said. “I felt like my heart was being ripped apart.”
By then, agencies were procuring most of their children directly from hospitals and maternity homes, which often received illegal payments for babies, records show. Though the stated intention of adoption was to spare children from orphanages, they gathered more than 4,600 children from hospitals in 1988, 60% of their supply.
“In paying rewards for childbirth delivery costs to hospitals, maternity homes, local administrative offices and others when acquiring children for adoption,” the Health Ministry wrote in 1988, “the social welfare institutions (agencies) have lost their morality and have descended to become trafficking institutions.”
A government audit the following year shows that Holt made nearly 100 illegal payments to hospitals during six months in 1988, worth about $16,000 now. Eastern Social Welfare Society gave even more, now worth about $64,000, to hospitals over that period.
The South Korean government declined to answer questions about its responsibility for the past, saying it will let the fact-finding commission finish its work. In a statement, the Health Ministry acknowledged that skyrocketing adoptions in the 1970s-80s were possibly driven by an intent to reduce welfare spending to balance cuts in foreign aid.
Lee Moo-ja, a retired local official in Boryeong city, recalled a sense of helplessness during the 1980s. Abandoned children were supposed to be reported to city officials, who would assign them to an orphanage, she said. But instead, agencies were directly scooping them up, and the pleading letters she sent to hospitals went nowhere.
The national government wasn’t interested in enforcement, she said, leaving local officials like her powerless to stop it.
Calabretta’s parents felt powerless too; they got onto an elevator with other couples holding their newborn children. All they had was the empty blanket.
-AP
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